By George! He’s Not Giving Up on His Own Reputation

As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, actually over the life of this series, George IV had some serious problems with his family, his reputation, and his own emotions.  When we left off, Brighton threw him a birthday party when his own parents ignored him.

Over the course the following year, The Prince and the Duke tried to increase the fortunes of the Whig party in London. Little was achieved; not least because, politically speaking, The Prince and the Duke were not exactly poster children for political reform. Nor did his close association with a spoiled, drunken prat like The Prince help Fox’s position as self-anointed “Champion of the People”.

It was Fox’s cross to bear that he and The Prince were so much alike. Fox genuinely liked The Prince, most people did. At least when he was behaving himself. Even his most vocal Tory enemies admitted he could charm the skin off a snake; when he was sober and applied himself. And therein lay the crux of Fox’s dilemma. It wasn’t only that The Prince drank too much; The Prince hardly held a corner in that particular market, public drunkenness was a fact of life at all class levels at that time. His worst offense was that he was emotionally incapable of applying himself to anything that did not involve his own pleasure.

He had been so utterly cocooned from the real world, and any real responsibility, that his turning out the way he did was almost a forgone conclusion. The fact that both parents treated him like an infant even after he had grown out of what we would today call pre- school age, must have had a negative effect. The fact that all his brothers were treated the same way, and their emotional responses to the Real World differed from The Princes only as a matter of degree, says much about the way they were raised.

It must have been intensely frustrating to Fox to realize that The Prince could disarm his political enemies and virtually secure the fortunes of the Whig party if only he would quit acting like a prat. But then, because of his own behavior, he was hardly in a position to deliver a sermon on proper adult demeanor. As I was saying, before I so rudely interupted myself, the year 1790 was a shaky one for The Prince.

It was, for one thing, a year of litigation. The Times, by far the most influential paper in England, was almost always against him. And why not, the papers publisher, John Walter, was receiving money from a secret government fund, (read: dad.) to keep up a steady stream of anti-prince, anti- Whig propaganda. Early in 1790, The Prince sued him for libel. He won. Walter was fined and imprisoned.

Upon his release a couple of months later, he was back at it. The Prince sued him again. And won again. This time, The Prince himself intervened to get Walter released before his sentence was up. Did His Highness get any brownie points for being such a nice guy? Of course not. As soon as Walter was back in his office, he was attacking The Prince as venomously as he had before.

There was a bright spot in this otherwise dismal year, however. One that went a long way to repairing The Prince’s battered reputation. And from the most unexpected quarter.